In environments with significant needs for managing and accessing data, a storage area network (SAN) often tends to be a solution of choice. SANs may be implemented using various technologies (e.g., Fibre Channel), which offer advantages such as data centralization, high-speed performance, and ease of data access, among others. In environments making use of a SAN, various entities within an organization can easily share storage resources. For example, whereas a storage system would otherwise be bound or attached to an associated host, in SAN environments, the storage system can be decoupled from the associated host for sharing on a high-speed network. Although sharing storage in this manner network can provide various advantages, such as noted above, SANs must also be configured for containment to control or otherwise manage access to the storage systems (e.g., for preventing unauthorized or accidental access to resources, or for balancing resources among various entities, or for other reasons). As a result, many SAN implementations use zoning techniques to compartmentalize or otherwise organize storage devices into logical groupings.
While SAN zoning can provide various advantages over an uncontained SAN (e.g., by segregating access to storage devices, or appropriately allocating storage resources, among other things), zoning also implicitly binds a SAN topology. When a SAN is further segregated into zones, however, any subsequent changes to the topology may affect zone integrity. Correlatively, to sustain zone integrity, it may be necessary to bind the SAN topology. Thus, using existing techniques for dividing a SAN into zones, it may be difficult or impracticable to update a SAN topology, to troubleshoot devices, or to perform other SAN management tasks, as modifying topological aspects of the SAN would compromise zone integrity.
Existing systems suffer from these and other problems.